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I am Perry Peterson, a retired auditor and tax accountant. My wife Valeta and I live along the front range of the beautiful Colorado Rocky Mountains.

Please note: some of the links in older postings on this website may have expired by the time you see them.

January 29, 2007

Rick Petri, a Madison Wisconsin attorney, found himself in an awkward situation last week.

Petri found himself in the embarrassing position of going to the Madison Police Department to pick up a client who had been arrested for drunken driving, only to be arrested himself for the same offense.

I’ll bet he is sober the next time he goes to pick up a drunk-driving client.

Construction projects in Yosemite National Park have come to a near standstill.

In November, a federal judge barred crews from finishing $60 million in construction projects in Yosemite Valley, siding with a small group of environmentalists who sued the federal government, saying further commercial development would bring greater numbers of visitors, thus threatening the Merced's fragile ecosystem.

"They want us to set a quota for the number of visitors coming into the park, which is something we just don't want to do," he said.

Yosemite is beautiful and deserves the full funding and protection of the federal government and should not be at the mercy of small special interest groups.

Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite National Park

Yosemite doesn’t need adverse decisions by activist judges supporting a few environmentalists funded by special interest groups who live hundreds of miles from the park.

Without the RV parks, walkways and other improvements, Yosemite would be more pristine. Without roads, Yosemite would be even more pristine.

But then, about the only people who would be able to take in the natural wonders and beauty of the park would be a few environmental activists arriving on foot or in 40-year-old VW microbuses. They would bring all of their worldly possessions consisting of a bedroll and a few wormy rice cakes wrapped in a soiled bandana. Oh, yes - they would also bring in their marijuana and would start open fires and leave their refuse behind.

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Contractors and planners working in Yosemite are very conscious of the aesthetics involved and whatever they build would come very close to blending into the natural landscape of the park.

January 28, 2007

The first steam roller to hit Detroit automakers was the United Auto Workers union.

The next steamroller that will flatten Detroit is the relentless propaganda campaign projecting polar bears in bikinis and palm trees in Antarctica.

Hysteria over global warming is turning Americans into a bunch of Henny-Pennys, rushing about screaming for someone to do something before we boil to death in the oceans' waters.

Democrats are listening. They see in the alarmism over greenhouse gasses a populist issue they can leverage to keep control of Congress and seize the White House. And they have a solution:

Squeeze the life out of Detroit's automakers.

The article here is mandatory reading for anyone who still thinks global warming is not a political issue.

Why will the Democrats zero in on the Big 3 Detroit automakers? Detroit is weak and less likely to fight back.

Domestic automakers are already reeling from the effects of union contracts which prevent them from competing with foreign automakers with realistic union contracts. Some even build cars in non-union plants.

If global warming is such an urgent problem, then Congress should have the guts to spread the pain broadly.

Why should carmakers pay all the cost? Americans create greenhouse gasses in a lot of ways other than driving cars.

Why not put limits on the size of new homes? Allot 500 square feet per person to cut heating fuel and electricity use, and tax any additional space.

Why not place carbon caps on households? Give every person a monthly kilowatt ration, and if they exceed it, they pay.

Don’t look for those things to happen, however. A congress controlled by Democrats will pick on the weakest large industry - Detroit automakers.

If the Big 3 crumble, politicians can always trade their Escalade’s in on Mercedes luxury SUV’s, and you can bet they will not agree to move into smaller houses!

I wonder how much sympathy Americans will have for the sweaty polar bears when they're standing in the unemployment line, paying double the price for an automobile and staring at the dark screen of their giant TV.

This story is about Microsoft getting in trouble with the Wikipedia folks.

Wikipedia is the Internet encyclopedia that allows article posting and article editing by nearly anyone.

Microsoft Corp. has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

It is no surprise that Microsoft found inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles.

With the huge number of articles in Wikipedia submitted by anyone, there are bound to be inaccuracies, some of them deliberate.

Microsoft further maintained that some of the articles were inaccurate as well as heavily slanted.

Why didn’t Microsoft make their own edits of the Wikipedia articles in question? They could to it surreptitiously like most everyone else does.